


Flight or flight

by armethaumaturgy



Category: Elsword (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings, Digital Art, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 06:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9109957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armethaumaturgy/pseuds/armethaumaturgy
Summary: Esper's taint manifests as a pair of actual, working wings. And he can't deal with it.Features art created by the lovelyDez





	

**Author's Note:**

> hey everyone if you havent yet bleas go check out [Dez](http://dezimaton.tumblr.com)

Esper stares at the mirror.

The mirror stares right back.

His pale face, unruly hair, magenta eyes, scar on mirrored left cheek. Everything would be okay — maybe except the returning circles under his eyes — if not for the background.

The things twitch when he brings his attention to them, the absolute nuisances. Two masses of black, with purple peeking here and there and magenta staring straight at him, with leathery sounds echoing with each movement. Absolutely disgusting. Repulsive. Repugnant.

They’re a side effect of the taint — or, at least he thinks so, since there isn’t any other logical explanation. They twitch again; he has to grit his teeth to stop himself from tching aloud.

They’re ugly, just like the rest of his tainted body. And what’s more important, they’re not supposed to be there. Humans don’t have wings, for El’s sake!

He looks into the mirror again, peers into his own deep eyes. They suddenly seem just a little more sunken.

_Is he still human, anyway?_

He shakes his head. He doesn’t have an answer to that question, but if it keeps going like this, he will.

He grabs the roll of bandages from the edge of the sink and gets to work, wrapping them around the new appendages and his chest with practiced movements. When he’s done, they’re squished flat against his skin, an uncomfortable feeling of the leathery surface right against his chest.

But it’s still better than either of his counterparts finding out.

When he pulls on his usual jacket, it’s like all traces of the disgusting wings have been erased. Except for the feeling, the uncomfortableness with each step and turn.

But it’s not something he can’t bear. He’s lived through much, much worse. This is nothing.

 _This is nothing_ , he repeats to himself as he leaves the bathroom to start the day.

* * *

The whole day feels off. Like everything is against him.

Lusa bumps into him, straight into the joint of the restrained wing, and Esper has to try his damned hardest to not cry out, because — wow! — that apparently hurts a lot! Now he knows.

Avoid collisions. Easy.

That might be easy, but life — and mainly his two counterparts — aren’t making it easy on him, in any case. Masi yanks him along when he wants help. Lusa pats his shoulder heartily; he’s not even sure why anymore, he’s zoned out thanks to the pain.

After the fourth — is it the fourth? He can’t count well anymore — time, Lusa stops him with a stern face, hands on his shoulders and holding him in place. His piercing gaze — sometimes it’s hard to believe they have the same eyes; Lusa’s seem so much more vibrant, like the contacts in them shine brighter than his or Masi’s — bore into Esper’s, and then look him up and down scrutinizingly.

“Are you hurt, Es?” he asks, and the question catches Esper completely off guard.

“No,” he answers, but it comes out sounding like a question in itself, with how confused he feels. “Why would I be?”

“You keep flinching everytime we touch you,” Lusa explains his reasoning and as if to empathize his point, he taps Esper’s shoulder blade, making the time traveler jump and hiss. “See—?” He has something he’s wanted to say, but it dies on his tongue as he feels the bound… something underneath Esper’s clothes. “Esper?”

“Yes. That’s my name,” Esper replies, though his attempt at a joke is ruined since he says it through ground teeth. He can’t believe it. He’d been doing so well hiding them for weeks — _weeks_! — and a single bad day and a concerned Lusa fucks it up? Unbelievable, truly.

“What’s that?” It’s more of a flatline than a question to be honest, and it in itself makes Esper flinch yet again.

“Uh—” is Esper’s very eloquent answer. He didn’t think to come up with a believable lie, because he didn’t believe he’d get caught.

Lusa stares expectantly, unmoving. Esper fidgets a bit under such an intense stare.

“Uh… It—”

“C’mon, Esper. Truth.”

There’s no getting out of this one, Esper knows. Once Lusa sets his mind to something, it’s game over. He sighs dejectedly and ducks under the berserker’s hands, taking a step backwards.

Without another word, he starts to pull his jacket off, leaving it thrown over the nearest surface — in this case, the coffee table. His top follows, after a bit of playing with the new pressure settings. The off-white bandages come into view, and along with them the lumps underneath.

Esper’s shoulders are sagged in dejection, even as he keeps going, slowly unwrapping them from around himself, layer after layer of bandages disappearing until his pale torso is fully visible, with the Moonstone sitting in the centre.

And, of course, the two extra appendages protruding from his back, shifting as they are released from their uncomfortable confines. Their leathery flaps fill the silence between the two Adds.

“Ah—” Esper starts, shrinking back when Lusa’s gaze settles on the foreign limbs. “I can explain…” He gulps. He can’t.

Lusa’s eyes glimmer almost dangerously, but Esper doesn’t wait for a verbal reply to his new additions. The scrutinizing, almost sickeningly pitying gaze had been more than he’d needed.

He grabs the bundle of his clothes from the table and hurries out of the room, wings tucked as close to his body as physically possible.

Whether it’s just to pass the doorframe or to appear smaller, Esper isn’t sure.

* * *

Lusa tells Masi, that’s obvious. Otherwise the scientist wouldn’t be demanding to get into Esper’s room. Esper isn’t letting him in, naturally, but he doubts Mastermind even expected him to comply and let him in in the first place.

Esper is sitting huddled on his bed, the whole source of the problem — the stupid wings — wrapped around him like a protective blanket.

There’s no warning to the loud whirring as one of Masi’s drones starts to cut the lock clean off the door with a bright pink laser.

The time traveler watches it helplessly — he could open a portal and go hide in a pocket dimension or anywhere he’d even think of, but then he’d still have to face Masi later. Better to get it out of the way now, listen to them saying how disgusting he is, how he’s turning into a monster, how he _is_ a monster…

Then he can leave this dimension, leave them alone, not having to deal with him and his taint anymore. Because even he knows that the taint is awful. _Especially he_ knows it. And it’s filling almost his whole body at this point — the new wings are nothing if not a proof of it. There’s so much taint that it manifested itself now, mutating his poor body.

_He truly isn’t human anymore._

It’ll be better for the others to be without him.

He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes just as the door opens, no longer locked. Masi’s light, regular footsteps come closer. They’re followed by the faint sounds of processors and swishing air, telling him Masi brought Apocalypse along. Well, that makes sense; that’s how he opened the door, then.

Esper waits, breath bated and heart hammering inside his ribcage. He can clearly imagine the look of disgust Mastermind is bestowing upon him right now. He’d seen it a thousand times already, he could picture it down to the very last little wrinkle on the scientist’s brow.

The silence stretches. Esper feels like falling through the ground, getting swallowed whole, bones and all.

Finally, Masi opens his mouth, but the words he articulates are not what Esper expects, so he almost immediately looks up at the long-haired man. “From Lusa’s description I assumed something terrible happened. Why are you holing up here?”

Esper looks up at him, dumbfounded. Masi’s face isn’t scrunched up in disgust as he’d expected, and looking down at him with his shoulders sagged, that mental image fades second by second. No, Mastermind isn’t disgusted. He looks more concerned than anything, with his brows knitted together, but with worry.

Esper had known him long enough to know the difference clear as day. He’s frowning, lips pressed into a tight line.

“You… okay?” Masi asks tentatively, when Esper just stares at him in silence.

The time traveler gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing heavily. The blasted wings curl even further around him, like they could actually protect him with their disgusting, leathery surface. All he manages is a shake of his head, because his voice fails to say ‘Of course I’m not! I have a pair of fucking wings because of the taint in my body and now you know about then, how could I be fucking oka—’

“Whoa, they’re real,” the inventor muses, stepping closer and reaching out to touch the additional appendages.

Esper flinches away, trying to scurry backwards, but he’s stopped by a wall right behind him.

“Don’t touch them!” he exclaims in panic, breath shuddering and eyes wide.

“Why?” Mastermind takes a step back, cocking his head sideways almost childishly. “Does it hurt?”

Esper grits his teeth so hard they hurt as he forces out, “No! Because they’re gross! Don’t touch them, they’re gross like the rest of my gross tained body!” He’s shaking by the end of the outburst, chest heaving with what looks to be the beginning of sobs bubbling inside his ribcage.

Hadn’t he cried enough already — when he’d discovered them?!

“They don’t look gross to me,” Mastermind remarks, regarding the wings with a judgemental look. “In fact, I think they suit you. How did you get them? Did they just appear? Did it hurt? Are they functional?”

As always, Mastermind is one to never pass up an opportunity to learn, bursting into a slew of questions that all go over Esper’s head, save for the very last one. “Can I touch them?”

This time asking, after a brief moment, Esper nods softly to him and Masi reaches out again, fingers running over the thin, leather-like skin over the bone. Esper shivers and the wing jerks a little, making Masi pull away momentarily to assess whether he hadn’t hurt the other man.

“They’re interesting,” he says, touching again, along the thin length down to the very end only to run his hand back up, fascinated by the texture.

Esper just watches him, fighting the tremors that threaten to wrack his body from the unfamiliar touch.

This was most definitely not what he’d expected the reaction to his new additions to be.

* * *

This is incredibly uncomfortable.

One would think that after weeks of going around with bound wings pressed against his chest, he’d feel relieved to have them free, but no, now it just feels weird.

He has to be careful to tuck them when going through doorways and not to knock something off when stretching or turning around. It’s so unusual, and he also doesn’t have to endure the discomfort — borderline pain, really — of having them bound anymore.

But what might be even more unusual are the others. Just this morning, Lusa had come in and told him the wings were ‘pretty’ and ‘go well with his eyes.’ Esper just told him he’d basically complimented himself, since they have the same eyes, because he’d been too flustered to come up with a proper, non-jokey response to the compliment.

Lusa must’ve been referencing the eye-like patterns near the wings’ elbows; they are the same color as his eyes. Probably the effect of the Moonstone wedged in his chest; it, too, is the same color.

And then Masi, not ten minutes later, when he’d been enjoying his morning mug of coffee, came in and casually brushed his hand against a wing on his way to the water kettle. Esper had almost spluttered out his coffee, but just barely managed not to.

Yes, this is absolutely uncomfortable.

But it’s leagues from what he’d actually expected; disgust and being told to leave because of his taint.

For that reason, a little discomfort is nothing, right? Especially when having the wings be touched, it actually doesn’t feel all that bad. And he’s never been the one to say no to compliments — well, at least not one to really mean it.

This might work out.

Him and his new limbs, they might work out, if the others aren’t repulsed.

Esper balls up the tinfoil from the tiny bar of chocolate he’d substituted for lunch and throws it into the bin. The others are waiting for him on the roof of their house — well, more specifically, Masi is waiting there. Lusa is stationed in the backyard, just underneath the edge of the roof. For safety reasons.

It’s time to test the wings out.


End file.
